FOCUS XYZ TOKEN SALE, WHITE PAPER AND EXPLANATION

Learn more about DeSo, the blockchain built to decentralize social media.

The Crypto Social Network

Built on DeSo, the Decentralized Social Blockchain

Focus is a new type of social network that mixes crypto speculation, social media, and generative AI. Focus is built from the ground up on the state-of-the-art Decentralized Social blockchain, aka DeSo, which is backed by Sequoia, Social Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Coinbase. Focus introduces new ways for creators to monetize and leverages a new kind of viral mechanic we call the social airdrop to maximize retention and solve the cold-start problem.

Introduction to FOCUS

All content on-chain, controlled by your wallet. Unlike with a traditional social network, all user content on Focus is stored directly on-chain, end-to-end encrypted where needed, meaning nobody can ever censor your content. This means that posting, following, messaging, trading, and all social primitives are controlled solely by users’ public/private keypairs, which they automatically get when they create an account. This has the added benefit that all content is automatically digitally signed by users’ private keys, making users’ identities impossible to forge or spoof, no matter how advanced generative AI becomes. With Focus, you can finally own your content and your identity just like you own your Bitcoin.

New ways to monetize. On the surface, Focus looks like Twitter but with anonymous crypto-enabled monetization mechanics that include paid reposts (aka decentralized ads), paid messages, unlockable content, subscriptions, and a feature we call Creator Coins that lets you invest directly in other creators’ revenue streams. In addition, because all content is on-chain, Focus pioneers uncensored generative AI to allow users to simulate new content from their favorite creators, both text and images, again leveraging crypto for anonymous, censorship-resistant payments. Furthermore, because all accounts on Focus are also crypto wallets, Focus introduces new feed algorithms based on wallet balance that are much more resistant to bots and gaming than traditional social network signals.



No company, just coins and code. Unlike traditional social networks, where a small group of venture capitalists and shareholders capture all the value of the techonology, 100% of all fees are distributed directly to the holders of $FOCUS tokens, which anyone can buy and earn from day one. There is no equity and no for-profit entity behind Focus. Tokens will be purchasable and directly tradeable on the DeSo DEX, a fully decentralized on-chain order-book exchange, via the Openfund client. Notably, $FOCUS tokens are also used to incentivize early adoption via a novel viral mechanic we call The Social Airdrop…

The Social Airdrop

Your profiles on other social networks are worth something, but how much are they worth exactly?

With Focus, you get $FOCUS tokens in direct proportion to how much influence you have on external social networks. To give some concrete numbers, someone with a thousand views per post would get a joining bonus of about $100 in $FOCUS tokens. In contrast, someone with millions of views per post, like Elon Musk or Obama, would get a bonus of approximately a hundred thousand dollars in $FOCUS tokens.

We plan to support X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, select email domains, DeSo, and OnlyFans at launch. Each network will have a slightly different reward function based on (1) the data we can collect when someone connects their account and (2) the value of user promotion on each platform.

Focus Referral Bonus

In addition, if you refer someone to Focus, you get 10% of their joining bonus and 5% of all revenues they generate on the platform. That means if you refer a significant influencer, you could get thousands of dollars up-front and potentially thousands more when they start generating income on the platform. Referring is as easy as sharing your link, and each external social account that your referee connects will earn them, and you, a separate airdrop amount based on the value of that account.

Account Valuations and Referral Rewards on Focus

To add an engaging element to the process of uncovering individuals' account values and inviting them to Focus, we introduce a tool to accompany Focus – The Bounty Hunter. This feature empowers users to swiftly assess the value of all their social accounts and the combined value of their followers across various platforms. Armed with this insight, users can not only gauge their potential reward for joining but also identify the most valuable connections in their network and estimate the potential earnings if they successfully persuade them to join. The Bounty Hunter goes a step further by offering a tangible estimate of how much users can earn by sharing their referral link with their entire follower base. This gamified approach adds a dynamic and interactive dimension to the user experience within the Focus platform.

The Focus Reward Structure: Tokenized Incentives and Long-Term Alignment

Importantly, the maximum reward is exclusively unlocked when a user actively shares their enthusiasm for Focus on other platforms and maintains the post for a specified duration, initially set at 7 days. This innovative approach transforms the social airdrop into a decentralized, bottom-up, token-driven advertising strategy, strategically designed to bootstrap the network. Early adopters, who boldly endorse the platform by leveraging their reputation, are set to reap disproportionate rewards.

Decentralized Advertising with a Token Twist

In addition to this, all $FOCUS tokens granted as user incentives are subject to a one-year lockup period. Post this initial lockup, the tokens vest over a subsequent 4-year period, adding up to a total vesting period of five years. This meticulous structure ensures that token recipients remain fully aligned with the platform's long-term success.
Ownership Beyond Rewards

What sets Focus apart is that every individual receiving a reward effectively becomes a stakeholder with $FOCUS tokens, essentially transforming them into part-owners of the platform itself. Picture gaining a share in Instagram or Twitter at their inception; while early adopters of those platforms received nothing, Focus allows users to attain founder-level ownership merely by joining and referring others. This unique model creates a community of vested participants, fostering sustained commitment and shared success in the evolution of the Focus platform.

Post to Earn

With Focus, the social airdrop targets virality, but this is not enough. In order to build true lasting value, a social network needs to retain great content creators and content consumers, which is notoriously difficult to do early on. To solve what we call the “cold retention” problem we introduce a simple incentive we call “Post to Earn.”

At its core, Post to Earn takes the top creators on the Focus platform each week, as determined by various signals, and distributes $FOCUS tokens to them (locked for one year with a four-year vest thereafter, same as airdropped tokens). While the rewards will change dynamically as we iterate this incentive in real time, the following simple schedule provides a concrete starting point:

• Top creator for the week: $5,000 in $FOCUS
• Next 100 creators: $500 in $FOCUS each
• Next 1,000 creators: $50 in $FOCUS each
• Next 10,000 creators: $5 in $FOCUS each
• Next 100,000 creators: $0.50 in $FOCUS each

This may seem generous, but it totals just $10.5 million per year, and guarantees no less than 100,000 high-quality creators engaging on a regular basis for as long as the incentive is active. Importantly, we would only be paying out the full amount if there are a large number of high-quality content creators that are worth spending on. So the spend will generally be highly-efficient.

But it isn’t enough for creators to engage on Focus– we need to create a meaningful incentive for consumers to check Focus instead of checking other platforms. To help make Focus’s content uniquely engaging, Post to Earn incentives will only be maximized when additional criteria are met, including:

• The creator has a pinned post linking followers to Focus on all of their connected platforms.
• The creator posted about Focus on another platform in the last week.
• The creator has engaged with at least N other posts in the last week.

This does not mean that creators will get zero for not meeting these other criteria, only that they will maximize their rewards by meeting them. Preference will also be given to creators who meet the additional criteria when assigning Post to Earn scores and rewards.

Importantly, Focus has a unique and unprecedented advantage against bots and gaming when it comes to determining the quality of user-generated content, which is that every user’s Focus account is also a crypto wallet. This means that wallet balance can be used as a signal, both to determine whether a particular account is a bot, but also to determine how much of a post’s engagement came from real users. In particular, wallet balance is both impossible to falsify and virtually costless for real users to maintain, making it generally superior to approaches that require monthly subscription fees. Other signals, such as the amount burned in fees on the platform, can provide additional non-gameable information as to each post’s true value.

To summarize, we believe Post to Earn can create unprecedented levels of retention that, when combined with the social airdrop, give Focus a very strong chance of solving the cold-start and cold-retention problems when it comes to content. And it’s only possible thanks to Focus’s wallet signals, which arise from the fact that every user’s account on Focus is also a crypto wallet.

New Ways to Monetize on Focus

Thanks to the DeSo blockchain and its Revolution Proof of Stake system, Focus users can transact in a variety of cryptocurrencies, including USDC, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, DeSo, and Focus tokens themselves, all for under 1/10,000th of a cent per transaction, including for cross-chain assets. What’s more, DeSo also supports the storage of content directly on-chain for 1/10,000th of a cent per post, which is much less than Solana at ~$1 per post or Ethereum at ~$100+ per post (source). This means that Focus can pioneer innovative monetization and content mechanics that are not possible with older high-fee blockchains or slower and heavily-censored fiat payment rails.


Paid reposts (aka decentralized ads). Focus turns advertising from a centralized model to a peer-to-peer model using a new mechanic we introduce called simply “paid reposts.” With Focus, any user can submit offers directly to creators to repost their content, and those creators can choose to either accept the offer, instantly get the money, and repost the requested content (with a “promoted” tag so people know it’s an ad), or reject the offer if they feel the content is not relevant enough for their audience. This new model allows creators to directly monetize their reach with just a few clicks through their inbox a day. During onboarding, all users set a “minimum offer threshold,” which could be thousands of dollars for big influencers, to prevent spammy offers from reaching their inbox. Offers below this threshold are still visible to the creator, only in a separate tab that is essentially a spam folder. Creators can also set a separate “minimum tip,” which they receive unconditionally, and which must be included in order for the offer to show up in their inbox at all (similar to the paid message fee). Amazingly, all offers are sent and managed fully on-chain using DeSo’s on-chain messaging infrastructure, meaning more sophisticated third-party apps can be built to help creators manage their personal media empires. The Focus platform takes a simple 10% fee from each offer that’s accepted, which is distributed directly to $FOCUS token holders.

Paid messages. Important people are constantly bombarded with spam on traditional social media platforms, to the point where virtually no important person has truly open DMs. Focus completely eliminates this spam problem by having every user set a “minimum message price” during onboarding, which requires any non-followed user to pay a certain amount in order for a message to reach the creator’s inbox. Messages that do not pay will still be visible to the creator, only in a separate tab that is essentially a spam folder. While the message price for ordinary users may be low, e.g. $0.01 for a typical user, for important users it could potentially be thousands of dollars or more. Imagine how much someone would be willing to pay to make 100% sure that a top venture capitalist sees their company’s pitch, or that a key strategic partner gives them a first look. As far as we know, this kind of paid messaging system has never been tightly coupled to a Twitter-like broadcast social network, and we believe it could vastly improve the quality of connections that users make. Amazingly, all messages are stored and delivered fully on-chain thanks to DeSo, again enabling third-party apps to build “power user” tools to help very important people manage their influx of messages, whether paid or not. The Focus platform takes a simple 10% fee from each message, which is distributed directly to $FOCUS token holders.

Uncensored generative AI. Generative AI has gotten to a point where, with just a few samples of a creator’s likeness, entirely new content can be generated. However, this functionality has yet to make its way into mainstream platforms– until now. Focus will give creators the full power of generative AI by allowing users to generate new content using the images that a creator has previously uploaded. Users will simply select images of their favorite creator from their history and provide a prompt to generate wholly new images. Creators will be able to set a fee for each query a user runs, and to earn an automatic royalty off of any income generated by the content (e.g. tips if the post is reposted). Focus will take a simple 10% cut of this revenue that will be distributed directly to $FOCUS token holders.

Unlockable content & subscriptions. Platforms like Patreon and OnlyFans pioneered subscriptions and unlockable content, and they process billions per year in revenue. But payments on these platforms aren’t anonymous, the platforms employ harsh censorship regimes, and the platforms suffer extremely high fiat payment processing fees. What’s more, cashing out from either platform requires creators to go through a very cumbersome KYC and approval process, which violates creator privacy, rejects many creators, and which most users frankly don’t have the patience for.

Focus fixes all of these issues inherently by allowing creators to monetize with instant, permissionless, anonymous, low-fee crypto payments using their DeSo wallet. Although it may seem like a small improvement over existing platforms, it is important to note that no platform exists where users can pay creators for content anonymously, and we believe the market for such a service could be quite significant.


What’s more, DeSo’s extremely low fees are critical to enable these new use-cases. Amazingly, all unlockable and subscription content is stored fully end-to-end encrypted on-chain, meaning that only the creator and their subscribers can see the content. Nobody else, not even the Focus devs can even see it! The Focus platform will take a simple 1% fee on this feature to completely undercut existing platforms, which charge ~15-30%, and this fee revenue will be distributed directly to $FOCUS token holders.

Creator Coins (aka tokenized creator revenue). Imagine being able to back an undiscovered creator, and then make money when they become a major influencer. Focus gives creators the ability to assign a percentage of their revenue to a token we call a “Creator Coin.” The upside for the creator is that they can directly sell a portion of their coins to raise funds, and they earn the trading fees associated with their coin. Anyone can have a Creator Coin simply by assigning a percentage of their revenue to it. Importantly, Creator Coins on Focus will be backwards-compatible with “v1” DeSo Creator Coins. Trading fees will be adjustable by the creator, with the default being 10%. The Focus platform will take half of whatever trading fee is set by the creator.To answer the question what is a creator coin.

A note on Creator Coins V2. For those already familiar with Creator Coins V1, as originally launched on BitClout, Focus will be the first app to utilize DeSo's new Creator Coins V2 primitive. Creator Coins V2 are still in active development, but we expect to make the following improvements over V1:

Real cashflows. Creators can allocate a voluntary percentage of their revenue to buy & burn their Creator Coin.

Cashout to any currency. With Focus, users have the ability to cashout directly to USDC or any other cryptocurrency supported by HeroSwap. Lack of cashout was the biggest complaint about BitClout.

Auction bootstrapping. With CCV2s, the initial Creator Coin supply can be auctioned off, rather than sniped by bots, and the creator gets a percentage of the proceeds based on their trading fee.

Softer curve. CCV2s have a softer bonding curve, as set by the automated market maker. The steepness of the original bonding curves was among the biggest complaints about CCV1.

Backwards-compatible. We are still working to ensure backwards-compatibility between V1 Creator Coins and V2 Creator Coins. Our aim is to provide a path to "upgrade" existing V1 Creator Coins to V2.

$FOCUS or $DESO-backed. Although this functionality is still in development, we are aiming to make it so that users can choose what they want their "base currency" to be.

End-to-end encrypted content. While all content is generally stored directly on-chain via DeSo, it is important to note that all messages and all subscription and unlockable content on Focus is end-to-end encrypted directly with users’ wallet keys. This is again only possible because every account on Focus is also a crypto wallet, with native encryption/decryption capabilities. This means that nobody other than the parties involved can see the content– not even the Focus devs themselves.

Split your referral bonus on FOCUS

Early on, to incentivize users to refer creators, referrers get half of the fee revenue. In particular, if the user generating the revenue was referred by another user, as will generally be the case with all users early on, then the fees will be split, such that the referrer receives half, and the other half is distributed directly to $FOCUS token-holders. This split will run for no less than one year from launch, and will continue as long as it is beneficial to the growth of the network, as determined by the Focus dev team. In practice, this means that a 10% fee quoted above would result in 5% going to $FOCUS holders while this incentive is active. This residual 5% that isn’t spent to incentivize referrals is what we consider the actual revenue of the Focus platform.

100% of Fees Go to $FOCUS

Even though Focus introduces many new ways to monetize, the platform’s economics are simple: Charge a modest fee on the income generated for creators, and distribute the fee revenue out to $FOCUS holders. The important thing to note about this is that $FOCUS token-holders are the sole beneficiaries of the fees earned by the platform. There are no “hidden” equity-holders, and there is no for-profit entity to extract rent from the token-holders. Simply put: 100% of income goes to $FOCUS.

The Flywheel

By introducing new ways for creators to monetize, the Focus platform creates a base of fundamental value via fee revenue that is distributed directly to the $FOCUS token-holders. Even if this fee revenue is initially small, as we fully expect it will be early on, the value of $FOCUS tokens could be orders of magnitude larger as long as there is some belief that the platform will eventually grow. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: A large initial market cap of $FOCUS means we can afford to distribute more tokens via incentives, increasing the platform’s growth rate, and thus increasing the value of $FOCUS even further. We provide more details on the exact tokenomics in FOCUS tokenomics paper.

The beautiful thing about this flywheel is that, as the value of $FOCUS increases, everyone who contributed to the platform’s success, i.e. everyone who holds $FOCUS, will hopefully see the value of their holdings grow with the success of the platform. Compare this to previous “web2” platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok, where creators were seen as mere tools to entrench the platform, and then tossed aside once a network effect was achieved. Focus ensures that the value of the network effect that is eventually created is owned by the people who helped create that network effect, which we think is an amazing thing.

Decentralizing Social Media

The Focus platform stores all of its content on the DeSo blockchain, whose code is 100% open-source. This means that, just like with Bitcoin, anyone on the internet can run a DeSo node that serves the Focus content, and every node on the network stores a full copy of all the data. This also means that anybody can build apps on top of the Focus data without the risk of being de-platformed, and they can even create their own completely novel UX’es and their own feed algorithms. You can learn more about the DeSo vision here.

When you visit focus.xyz, you’re using our DeSo node, but there are already hundreds of nodes on the network, all run by people like you. In the long run there will likely be thousands of other nodes you could visit to get access to the same content, each with their own custom features. It also means that your DeSo wallet login on focus.xyz can be used on any app that integrates with the DeSo wallet.

What information is stored on-chain? Basically all of it. Every profile, every post, every engagement, every follow, every DM (encrypted), every token holding, and on and on... As we built out Focus, we strived to make it so that every single feature, including complex features like paid reposts and unlockable content, is a feature that a third-party app could permissionlessly provide an interface to, based solely on the data that’s available on-chain. No walled gardens, no “data moats,” no BS. This included a joint effort to upgrade the DeSo blockchain itself to allow it to cheaply handle every possible use-case, making DeSo arguably the most advanced blockchain on the planet, as users will soon experience first-hand.

In the same way that you can move Bitcoin from one wallet to another, DeSo makes it so that you can move your identity and content, in the form of your profile, followers, posts, token balances, etc anywhere as well. Thus, in some sense, we hope Focus and DeSo will decentralize social media in much the same way as Bitcoin is decentralizing the financial system.


I hope that you have enjoyed reading this bulb.io blog post about the FOCUS.XYZ token sale and structure of the decentralized social media network that is being built as we speak through DESO.

Have a great day and I look forward to reading your comments about FOCUS

@litecoinpete